Customer Reviews

Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain's Final Years

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4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
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This is a fascinating, well written and painstakingly researched book. Finally, a book on our friend Mark Twain that tackles new terrain. It reads like an exciting, suspenseful mystery. Lystra sifts through all the evidence surrounding Twain's last years and his tangled relations with his secretary, Isabel Lyon and his daughters, Clara and Jean. It is sad to read about Twain, the
widower, hungry for love and a real home, succumbing to the flattery and duplicity of his unscrupulous secretary. She schemed to marry him and seperate him from his daughters. She almost succeeded. Plainly, he never would have married her. His unwavering love for his late wife stopped that folly. But she did manage to build a wedge between him and his daughters. Twain was manipulated and lied to and encouraged to give in to his worst weaknesses. This led to his sad betrayal of his epileptic daughter, Jean. It is interesting to compare his wife Olivia with Isabel Lyon. His wife had a powerful strength that belied her often frail health. It is obvious that she brought out many of his best qualities. She was a true helpmate and companion to him. She expected him to live up to his moral and familial responsibilites. She kept him centered and clear thinking - no easy task! Without her as his emotional and moral anchor - he gave in to human weakness and selfishness. Yet, it is inspiring and uplifting to witness him looking deep within himself and unflinchingly recognizing his character faults and their terrible consequences. It is a truly courageous act. He makes amends to his daughter , who he really does love and who loves him. Father and daughter experience happiness during their final days together. You come away from their story with admiration for both of them.

For the best, most balanced, and most knowledgeable review of this book, see Barbara Schmidt's detailed critique that appeared on June 16, 2004 in the Mark Twain Forum, an online resource dedicated to Mark Twain studies.
Schmidt gives Lystra full credit for opening new light on a controversial relationship in Twain's last years but faults her for not examining certain documents crucial to her accusations of Lyon's and Ashcroft's perfidy.

Having recently completed Fred Kaplan's "The Singular Mark Twain" and Ron Powers' far better recent biography "Mark Twain: A Life," which each refer to this book, I was delighted to receive a copy for Christmas. As Karen Lystra points out, virtually every biography of Samuel Clemens describes his final years as unremittingly bitter, while the truth is not quite so one-sided. More importantly, unlike biographers who characterize Clemens' eventual attacks on Isabel Lyon, his secretary during most of his final years, and her helpmate and eventual husband, Ralph Ashcroft, as hyperbolic fantasies, Lystra takes Clemens at his word. She details how Lyon and Ashcroft insinuated themselves into Clemens' world, preying on his loneliness and enormous ego to give themselves power and legal authority over his affairs. Most powerful of all, Lystra focuses as no one else ever has on Clemens' youngest daughter, Jean, including both the heartbreaking story of the prejudice she faced because of her epilepsy, as well as how her father abandoned her. Although that separation was urged on Clemens by Lyon, who even went so far as to intercept letters Jean wrote to her father begging for his attention and visits, Clemens himself acknowledged some years later, when he fired Lyon and Ashcroft and brought Jean back into his life, that he himself was unforgivably to blame. All of this is told is a way that gives new insights into Clemens and the considerable imperfections that accompanied his unparalleled talent and fame as an American author.

My only complaint -- making this a four- rather than five-star review -- is that Lystra is a pedestrian writer. The book truly comes alive only when she quotes the primary source material -- the diaries of Jean and Clara Clemens, the letters of friends and family, and of course Twain's own autobiographical writings. But she finds wondrous excerpts from all of these to quote, and for that, her thesis, and shining a light on Clemens's failings, this book is a must for anyone who wants to know more about Mark Twain.

Karen Lystra might be the very first scholar to study, systematically, the diaries of Jean Clemens, Mark twain's epileptic daughter whom he kept institutionalized for many years. Jean seems like a lovely young woman, with lots of character and a sweet streak that seems truly remarkable when one considers how awful her life was. (She was the least favored of the three daughters of Samuel and Olivia Clemens, and it seems that her father blamed her somewhat for bringing on the catastrophe in "Livy's" health.) All these matters are gone into with a thoroughness and a sensitivity that makes the book a fine document on illness and social pressure regarding treatment and cure.

What then prevents this book from attaining a higher place on the shelf of Twain scholarship? Somewhere in the years it took to research and write this book, the author seems to have lost her objectivity. That's understandable, but an editor might have helped her to tone down her continuous sneering at Isabel Lyon, Twain's onetime secretary whom Lystra seeks to portray as a combination of Lady Macbeth and Mata Hari. Twain thought highly of Isabel Lyon, but when she married Ralph Ashcroft, one of his financial advisers, he turned on both of them and charged them with embezzlement. Previous scholars have seen this episode as one of Twain embittered, lonely, paranoid and suspicious; and certainly Karen Lystra is within her rights to re-evaluate the evidence and to argue that, indeed, Lyon was an embezzler. But she cannot persuade me that Lyon "schemed" to marry Twain. The evidence just isn't there.

Perhaps Isabel was attracted to him sexually, though Lystra treats Lyon's sexuality as a thing of shame. She used to like to watch Twain half-naked, in his white silk undershorts; but maybe the age difference between them (nearly thirty years) disgusts Lystra, for she does her best to make this sex attraction repulsive.

Worst of all is her tone and the way she distorts all the evidence, major and minor. In one passage she pokes fun of Isabel's flattery of the Twain family, citing one of Isabel's diary passages in which she compares Clara Clemens to an angel. Excuse me, but a diary entry is not flattery! Flattery is when you tell somebody something nice about themselves which you don't believe! It is not when you write something nice in a secret diary which the other person will never see.

If she can't directly connect Jean's expulsion from Twain's home to Isabel's so-called plots, she will instead say, "Skillful ventriloquists do not move their lips," as if a lack of evidence was itself evidence. No, sorry, it's not.

When Twain turned against Lyon and Ashcroft, he threw himself into writing a diatribe against them that ran to nearly 430 pages. Lystra would have us believe that this is a great piece of writing. The passages she quotes from it are pretty grim. I don't know, maybe it's this King Lear-like late greatness. He seems to have persuaded her, at any rate. Lyon was a "brute," wrote Twain. "Just a plain, simple, heartless brute, and rotten to the spine." She's a prostitute, a buzzard, a superannuated virgin. Well I for one think the story might have been a bit more complex than the one Lystra relates.

Her acidity extends even to the captions of the photos in the middle of the book. Most of the captions are non-judgmental ("Albert Bigelow Paine and Mark Twain playing billiards, 1908"). Then you get to a photo of Isabel, and it's "Isabel Lyon posing dramatically." Get it? The woman can't even tell the truth when she's not even speaking.

I mean the Lyon woman of course.

Dangerous Intimacy is a quick read, based on the diaries of Jean Clemens and Isabel Lyon... A story that is, in due time, told here almost 100 years after it occurred, and which the Clemens family (specifically Twain) went out of their way to diffuse and keep out of the public eye.

For me, Lystra's approach is useful as she delves into the power-dynamics of the women closest to Twain the last decade of his life. I give it 4 stars because there is much speculation to motives on her part, however the writing is thorough and does allow the reader to come to one's own conclusions. It becomes clear Twain loved his secretary's doting attention in spite of the loss of his wife and daughter Susie. He was someone who needed to be at the center of things; Isabel Lyons was more than happy to protect his private universe. If you love someone, you protect them. She loved Twain.

It seems he managed to string her along, perhaps secretly enjoying his ability to keep the woman in contortions. I get the sense this was the best he could give her (sexually). That might not have been something he was willing to admit until he was on his death bed, which is good. Lystra gives a great outline of some of Twain's last thoughts on male and female sexuality towards the end of the book.

Regardless, the boundaries between himself and his secretary became so diffused - she might NOT have thought twice about ripping him off, financially. She began to lose her stealth in the final years she was with Twain, between drink and overreaction to the presence of his daughters, who were for her direct competition.

This book is bothersome... Because it is about the lack of personal boundaries these individuals had (Lyons was an alcoholic, and Twain was an egotist to the 10th degree). It is a disturbing read because we want to believe in the idealistic views of being witty and human; whereas Lystra points out, Twain was a helpless personality without the love and adoration of the females around him. Further, she follows the story out to as far as 1969, outlining a little of what happened with the much fought over Clemens fortune, and finally, the death of Lyons. A VERY sad story about what wealth, desire and greed will do to people!